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Rush Transcript: Governor Cuomo Announces Federal Government Has Agreed Not to Collect Undocumented Identification as Part of Federal Vaccination Program

December 9, 2020

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

We do have good news. We waged a similar effort on the rules for vaccinations for undocumented people. The way the federal government constructed the program - basically they wanted the states to collect Social Security numbers, passport numbers or driver's license numbers for anybody vaccinated. These are all bells for people who are undocumented, alarm bells, and it sounded like you were trying to use the vaccination to identify undocumented people. We have gone through this with the federal government at length with the Trusted Traveler Program previously.

If undocumented people don't get vaccinated it compromises their health and it compromises the whole program. Again, the program only works if you hit a critical mass of the population. If you say, well the undocumenteds we're going to exclude practically because they won't come in and participate, you have 50 percent of the population that's skeptical, we're not going to reach out to the Black, Latino and poor communities, it's never going to be a success. So we raised this point again, we did letters, I did speeches, spoken out publicly, and HHS has agreed. CDC specifically, has agreed that the State will not send individual data identifying a person in a way that could be used to document citizenship, et cetera.

We insisted on that in the what's called the data use agreement, and CDC agreed. So that is a better vaccination program for this country and for this state. It took a lot of work but I want to congratulate all the advocates and people who stepped up and spoke up because it was a good service.